Hubertus von Amelunxen & Adel Abdessemed. Réponds, sable!. 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures     2016年12月9日
http://www.egs.edu Hubertus von Amelunxen & Adel Abdessemed, Professor of Philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS. Saas Fee/Switzerland. June 15th 2016.
Adel Abdessemed is a French-Algerian artist. He embraces a wide variety of media, and his work includes installations, videos, photography, sculptures, drawings, and books. His oeuvre is characterised by brutal imagery that attempts to depict the inherent violence of the contemporary world. His works often deal with the themes of war, violence, and religion.
Abdessemed was born in Constantine, Algeria where he attended the Fine Arts School in Batna and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1992, while he was still a student, a military coup occurred in his country; more than 100,000 people lost their lives in the subsequent violence. This is why Abdessemed says: “The violence that I talk about, I experienced it very directly. To this day, the wounds stay open, and the questions remain unanswered: the arson attacks, the mass rapes, the unpunished murders.” After the director of his school, Ahmed Assalah, and his son were murdered on the school premises, Adel Abdessemed emigrated to France and enrolled the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. At this school, his work drew the attention of the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. In 2000, he obtained a residency at PS1 in New York, and he witnessed the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001. After the end of his residency, he moved to a Berlin for a short time and then to Paris just before the street riots of 2005. All these events feature prominently in his works.

Hubertus von Amelunxen is a theorist, curator, and artist. He holds the Walter Benjamin Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS, where he teaches Media Philosophy and Cultural Studies. He was born on December 29, 1958, in a town called Bad Hindelang in Bavaria, Germany. He studied Romance Languages and Literature (French, Spanish), German, and Art History in Marburg (Philipps-Universität) and Paris (École Normale Supérieure), and finished his PhD at the University of Mannheim with a thesis on nineteenth century French literature (Allegory and Photography). Professor von Amelunxen was a Founding Director and Professor at the International School for New Media in Lübeck (Germany). Additionally, he is a Senior Visiting Curator for Photography and New Media at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (Canada).
Hubertus von Amelunxen has curated many international exhibitions since 1989, among them "Photography after Photography" (which toured in Europe and the USA in 1995 and 1996), "Les lieux du Non-Lieu", Munich (1997); "Le territoire en deuil", Arles (1998); "Tomorrow For Ever – Photographie als Ruine", Krems, Duisburg (1999/2000).
In both his writing and his curatorial practice, Hubertus von Amelunxen invites us to reconsider the medium and the concept of photography in the face of current technological changes, both its artistic translation and its social utilisation. He formulates the conflict between the first photograph, or the first technically generated image, and the 'new media' as a starting point for this redefinition. According to him, the digitization of the photographic image opened up new possibilities for montage and manipulation. At the same time, this also opened a space to create the analogy between the computer screen and psychic space: in it, the residues of daily perception are collected and linked by the individual, the shocks of the everyday are absorbed into the medium, and their repetition on screen can be seen as a process of continual analytical transference work. On another level, this new procedure makes it possible to atomise and fragment patterns of identity. According to Hubertus von Amelunxen, the digital imaging techniques have literally turned off the photographic model of representation. With this altered ontology of the photographic image, he notices the limitations of the language we use to analyze photographs. We are still naming something that actually no longer exists, and von Amelunxen underlines the necessity for a new grammar, a new syntax, and a new logic of elements within mutating historical circumstances.